There is considerable interest in monitoring and measuring the usage of media data accessed by an audience via a network or other source. In order to determine audience interest and what audiences are being presented with, a user's system may be monitored for discrete time periods while connected to a network, such as the Internet.
There is also considerable interest in providing market information to advertisers, media distributors and the like which reveal the demographic characteristics of such audiences, along with information concerning the size of the audience. Further, advertisers and media distributors would like the ability to produce custom reports tailored to reveal market information within specific parameters, such as type of media, user demographics, purchasing habits and so on. In addition, there is substantial interest in the ability to monitor media audiences on a continuous, real-time basis. This becomes very important for measuring streaming media data accurately, because a snapshot or event generation fails to capture the ongoing and continuous nature of streaming media data usage.
Based upon the receipt and identification of media data, the rating or popularity of various web sites, channels and specific media data may be estimated. It would be advantageous to determine the popularity of various web sites, channels and specific media data according to the demographics of their audiences in a way which enables precise matching of data representing media data usage with user demographic data.
As disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,827 to Schuster, et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,222,071 to Neuhauser, et al., which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety herein, specialized technology exists where a small, pager-size, specially-designed receiving stations called Portable People Meters (PPM) allow for the tracking of media exposure for users/panelists. In these applications, the embedded audio signal or ID code is picked up by one or more PPMs, which capture the encoded identifying signal, and store the information along with a time stamp in memory for retrieval at a later time. A microphone contained within the PPM receives the audio signal, which contains within it the ID code.
One of the goals of audience measurement is to identify the audience for specific channel viewing. With the HDTV and Digital age upon us, nearly every household has a STB attached to their TV, this allows for access to viewing habits and other household penetration. Therefore it would be advantageous to integrate audio encoding technology with one or more STBs for monitoring purposes. Furthermore, due to the STB's advanced design, performance and scalability, the STB does not only supply high real-time performance affordably, but can also be easily remotely reprogrammed for new configurations, updates, upgrades and applications. The integration of audio encoding technology with STB devices would eliminate unnecessary equipment and reduce associated costs.